


Meat, Space

by primeideal



Category: The Martian - Andy Weir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cannibalism, Epistolary, Extra Treat, Gen, Profanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26406517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: TheTaiyang Shenintercept with the Hermes doesn't work.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 32
Collections: Darkest Night 2020





	Meat, Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ScarletSleeper (MGVR)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MGVR/gifts).



Day 207, Melissa

Fuck.

I recognize that this isn’t going to be the most eloquent of transmissions. I also realize that Planet Earth has been receiving Watney’s logs/engineering reports/bad music opinions for the last several months, so they can handle my blunt assessment.

...Actually, if you’ve lost contact with him, you’re going to _keep_ receiving his messages for the _next_ several months, until you can tell him that we won’t make it. That’s probably worse.

Fuck.

Some NASA suits are going to be trying, very hard, to cover their asses. The facts are: 1. they knew about the potential for an Earth flyby and hid it from us so we wouldn’t be at increased risk. 2. someone—I don’t know who, and I don’t care—went behind their backs to send us the coordinates. 3. we all, knowing the risks not just to our lives but also our career, agreed to mutiny against our officers millions of miles away.

Well, they can say they told us so. Just not to us.

I also want to make it extremely clear that we didn’t give Johanssen a chance to make her case. I mean, all of us committed to going back for Watney. Given time to put it to a vote, I know she’d have been just as insistently selfless as anyone else. But she’s not only the smallest, she’s the youngest and has the most ahead of her as well as the most diverse skillset.

People are gonna ask, is it worth it, to spend zillions of dollars on launching burning gas into space and having humans bounce around on a world where there’s no oxygen and no water. I could tell you about Gus Grissom and Vladimir Komarov and last century’s pioneers. I could also tell you about how much people spend on things like car racing, going around and around in dangerous automobiles that can and sometimes do kill you because it’s cool. But ultimately, I don’t think anything I—someone who worked for years to have the chance to go to Mars on a new, unproven technology—have to say is going to convince anyone else. The truth is, there are lots of other problems to tackle on Earth, and if watching our brightest minds try everything they could think of to save Watney has soured you on the idea of space travel, I can’t blame you.

What I can say is this: Mars isn’t going anywhere. A hundred years ago there was no Apollo program. Two hundred years ago, no electricity. Three hundred years, no USA. The same old dust was sitting there on Mars. Even in the best-case scenario, our lives are a lot shorter than a planet’s. Someday we’ll be back.

Well, I mean, assuming we haven’t all killed each other before then.

Sorry. This wasn’t supposed to be _that_ bleak, but you can’t blame us for some gallows humor under the circumstances.

Hindsight is 20/20. So if it helps the suits sleep at night, sure, we would not have done the same thing knowing what we know now. But we didn’t know that then, that’s not how causality works. Being who we are, we probably would have done the same thing. I mean, if you disagree, that’s some quantum-indeterminacy nonsense right there.

Day 209, Beth

The first thing I did was to program a script to auto-respond for me. Confirming that I’m still alive and that nothing else critical has broken. I wonder how long Mission Control will get away with it before they try to make me respond like a human.

Hopefully a long time.

Day 212, Jessica Liu, _Los Angeles Times_

The Space Race of the Cold War era was a proxy for saber-rattling as well as efforts at negotiations. American and Soviet politicians beat their chests as their astronauts launched into space, and took credit for international collaboration when the space shuttles landed on Mir.

This century has seen less acute geopolitical tensions between the major powers, but that doesn’t mean space isn’t a political bargaining chip. European nations have pooled their resources into the ESA, enabling first-class scientific research but also exasperating regionalist Euroscepticism. China has tried to forge its own path, only to magnaminously offer the _Taiyang Shen_ to an embattled NASA. And, well, we all know how that worked.

While both nations’ scientists will attempt to stay objective amid the inevitable investigations and finger-pointing, some will claim that China should have saved its booster for an independently-run project. They’re not entirely wrong. But can you fault the nation for putting its own research interests second to the photo opportunities from provisioning Mark Watney, the name that’s been on everyone’s lips for months?

Instead of squabbling over whose nation can do better next time, it’s time for the world’s space agencies to look towards a more integrated agenda, one that can solve 21st-century problems instead of fighting 20th-century battles. The goals of an international, scientifically-driven agency might not be as sexy as planting flags on Mars, but then again, they might be less likely to get astronauts of any nationality killed.

Day 220, Beth

Mark was going to be a guinea pig for who knows how many scientists back home. Nutritionists, psychiatrists, zoologists, all fascinated by what would happen to a guy stuck on Mars for a year or two.

Now they’ll have to settle for me. What happens to a woman alone in a spaceship for seventeen months, maybe half of which will be spent eating the remains of my crewmates?

I’m getting really good at maintenance. You’d think that after a couple weeks I’d be rushing through things. Nope. The difficult part is slowing down, not letting my mind wander as I check and double-check everything that should have been a team responsibility, so that we’d have fresh eyes on every switch and gear and compartment. I guess it’s easier to think about buttons, even very boring loading screen buttons, than the rest of my job.

Part of me thinks it won’t work. That I can’t possibly be lucky enough to have no accidents for over a year; that I’ll do everything right but something will break that needs four hands to fix and I won’t stand a chance. That I won’t make it home without the others, won’t have to explain what happened.

Maybe fate would do that to me. But the way things are going, it would be cruel enough to let me survive for a few months first, give me false hope or fear. So I go through the motions, day after day.

Day 256

“Where’s Purnell?” Teddy snapped.

Mitch raised his eyebrows. “ _Now_ you want to meet him?”

“I want him to translate this bullshit into English so we have _something_ to tell the press.”

“With respect, Teddy, Purnell’s notes may be jargony, but his signal-to-noise ratio is as good as anyone’s. The lawyer words and hemming and hawing you do on screen, _that’s_ bullshit.”

“Mitch,” said Teddy, “you are a very fortunate man. The only reason you still have a job is because we had to cover our asses and not report you for doing an end run. So don’t push your luck. Now, where’s Purnell.”

Mitch shrugged. “Probably California.”

“He’s at the JPL?”

“No, Vandenberg.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“Working for SpaceX, I think.”

“How did _that_ happen?”

“Well, first one applies for a job and attaches a letter of recommendation, then one gets an interview, then maybe there are salary negotiations in the private sector, and after _that—_ ”

“Mitch.”

“I’ll be the first to admit he might not have had the soft skills to ace the interview, but look at his work. Besides, can you blame him for wanting to get out of the government bureaucracy?”

Day 273, Beth

You probably wonder if they taste different. The answer is: they don’t, but even if they did, I wouldn’t know. It took me a few weeks, but once I had the energy—and I mean that more emotionally than physically—I went ahead and chopped everything edible up into one featureless pile and got rid of everything else so I wouldn’t have to look at it again.

Day 300

Mindy Park quickly glanced through the satellite imagery. Phobos high-orbit flyby looked good. Volcanic areosychronous satellite needed some tweaking. And then there was the long-range elliptical.

That was a problem. Her bosses had wanted to focus on Watney soon after it became clear he was alive. Mindy had pointed out that one, it wouldn’t tell them anything that a public-domain sleuth accessing NASA’s website wouldn’t already know, and two, the orbit was erratic enough that it would deviate from his location quickly, and it would be two years before they crossed again.

Except then he’d started moving. And then the Hermes flyby had failed, and everybody stopped worrying about Mark Watney. They probably assumed he had died shortly after; it was better than the alternative. Now the satellite was going to fly over him again. And capture what? Close-ups of the jerry-rigged solar panels?

Mindy hesitated, then adjusted the orbit. It wasn’t much, just slowing down for a few sols and then pivoting to the north. When her bosses asked why they were looking at the same canyons, they could readjust course and gradually ease back on target. Better to get forgiveness then permission, the saying went, especially if the thing you were doing risked public embarrassment yet again.

She wondered if the mutineers had justified themselves the same way.

Day 319, Beth

I haven’t even talked to my mom, not really. How pathetic is that?

I write to her, of course. Send video messages. But only when I know she’s asleep and I’ll be asleep by the time she gets it. “Beth!” she yells in the time-delayed replies. “Just _call_! I don’t care if I’m asleep, you’re in _space_ , I’ll wake up for you.”

At this point I’m probably healthier than she is. Maybe it’s all the protein in my diet.

Back on earth there was this old joke about how anxiety is always worse at night than during the day, probably because gravity is pulling it to the ground when you stand up, but when you lie down it drifts all through you. Well, there’s no gravity here—after a certain point, it’s impossible to feel any more survivor’s guilt. It doesn’t weigh me down, it just floats all around me like the pressurized air.

Day 372, Beth

Mission Control caught a glitch I hadn’t seen. There was a problem with the temperature control that I tried to patch, but we decided to let it be unless it escalates. To be fair, it was in one of the empty sleeping quarters, so it wasn’t like I would have reason to be there anyway.

“You should try moving around the ship more,” they suggest. “Get some extra stimulation.” Yeah, like listening to Commander Lewis’ disco collection isn’t going to drive me insane. It sounds like that almost broke Mark more than the whole Mars thing.

It’s not that I’m worried about invading anyone’s personal space. What are they going to do, haunt me? It’s just easier to get by when I pretend it’s a normal mission, that there’s someone across the hall waiting to yell at me if I forget to run diagnostics or debug the apps. That we all have to do our part in order to get us all home.

Sol 497, Mark

In 1877, Mars was in a good position relative to Earth for astronomers to view it and make observations. One of those observers was an Italian guy named Giovanni Schiaparelli. Even if you don’t know his name, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of his work. See, our buddy Giovanni saw a bunch of _canali_ , or channels, on Mars. This got translated into English as “canals,” and fueled a lot of wild, but totally off-base, speculation about “Mars looks like Venice and there are little Martians rowing their gondolas all across the planet.”

The moral of the story, I guess, is that collaboration is good, but you should still have someone proofread your translations before you publish them all over. I mean, I’m relying on a booster assembled in China.

The other thing is that despite, or maybe because of, this little mess-up, Schiaparelli got a huge crater on Mars named after him. (Another one on the moon, actually, but I’m not _that_ lost.) Tomorrow, I’m going in! It’s not Earth, but it’s the closest thing I’ll have to human communication since I killed Pathfinder 400 days ago.

Sol 505, Mark

Fuck.

Sol 506, Mark

I’m gonna be honest, I’m pretty angry. But really, they’re not the ones who broke Pathfinder. What were they supposed to do, hold up a big sign that said “Hey Mark, Don’t Bother”?

They said Johanssen is still on the Hermes and is going to do a flyby. Did she seize control of the ship and send everybody else out the airlock? I admit, I didn’t take her for the type, but you have to have guts to sign up to go to Mars, I guess. And it helps if you can hack the ship.

Still. Would have thought Beck at least would try to bargain for his life. It’d be kind of romantic, castaways in space. Except apparently he’s dead too and she’s stuck on her own for another 253 days. They measure in days up there, not sols.

It’s too bad there isn’t someone who has experienced that kind of mind-numbing, soul-crushing isolation who can tell her what to do.

...Fuck.

Sol 507, Mark

Hey, Beth. It’s me, Mark! You know, the guy you thought was dead but then oops, he wasn’t dead and then oops, NASA didn’t _tell_ you he wasn’t dead, and then you came back to get him, and now everybody _else_ is dead.

I guess you already figured that much out. I mean, if someone else is sending you a transmission from the planet, you have bigger problems than me.

No hard feelings. Really. I mean, it sucks, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t been having a lot of fun either. But I also assume when you deposed Lewis you inherited all her responsibilities, including blaming yourself for this situation. Pretty sure that’s how that works, right? If I’m the first space pirate, you’re the first space usurper.

Thank you for that ASCII chart, by the way. I know you’re a nerd, but I was worried you were so nerdy you’d have memorized it all. Some of us still need the hex codes to set up communication with Earth. I mean, if it wasn’t for that little camera, I wouldn’t have been able to make this trek. Which was miserable and grueling and pretty fucking anticlimactic, but at least I had hope. If you’re still in one piece after making it this far alone, you can make it back.

I wish I had some more words of wisdom for you, but most of what I learned here comes down to “fuck Mars,” “fuck potatoes,” and “fuck disco.” Not always in that order. It helps that I was so busy fixing things there wasn’t a lot of time for self-pity. So maybe you just need to keep yourself challenged. Cut important-looking wires if you’re ever bored, and then ask yourself, “what would a talented, gritty, handsome space pirate like Mark Watney do?” And then do that.

The first time I wrote to you guys I asked Martinez to check in on my parents. Tell them about how we spent a week on Mars. Well, that plan’s off the table. I’d ask you to do the same, but I’m guessing you’ll have a shit-ton of other people to talk to and messages to relay. So I’d say—take time for yourself, too. Visit England and get a picture of yourself crossing Abbey Road and annoying all the drivers or at Agatha Christie’s house or something. Whatever it is you’re into, I don’t know.

Thank you for trying. I know this is to everyone else as much as you, but I know you must all have signed up. Even if it didn’t work, you have no idea how happy it made me to hear you guys were going to come back. The others, I guess I’ll have to tell myself.

-Mark

Day 535, Beth

Whoever said “you are what you eat” can—and I mean this entirely metaphorically—bite me.

If I’ve changed, it’s not because there are bits and pieces of Lewis and Vogel and Martinez and C—and Beck streaming in and out of my digestive system. But because I’ve needed pieces of _them,_ Lewis’ decisiveness and Vogel’s curiosity and Martinez’ faith and Beck’s dedication, and even, yes, Watney’s resilience. Lewis knew I was the most versatile; I’m not sure if she knew that I would have to become a one-woman crew, carrying the rest of them with me.

I think it might be more true that you are what you breathe. I remember getting into arguments with Beck, doing Fermi estimates of approximately how many molecules are in Earth’s atmosphere. If you breathe in maybe 10^21 molecules with every breath, on average, one of those will have come from Julius Caesar’s last breath. Or Jesus or Buddha or anyone who lived long enough that their nitrogen has gotten around. Beck pointed out that oxygen and nitrogen atoms both break down and reforge into different molecules, so you might have to go to the atomic level to get a meaningful answer.

But the point stands that for two hundred and eight days, we weren’t breathing the same air as Caesar and everybody else. It was just us, and then it was just us minus Mark, and now it’s just me.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to go back to breathing normally, to be part of the world in real-time without communication delays or shipboard oxygen. Good thing I still have plenty of time to get ready.


End file.
